Second-order multipole formulas for thermal resistance of single U-tube borehole heat exchangers

Abstract

The borehole thermal resistance is both an important design parameter and a key performance characteristic of a borehole heat exchanger. Another quantity that is particularly important for deep borehole heat exchangers is the internal thermal resistance between the upward-flowing and downward-flowing fluid channels in the borehole. The multipole method is a well-known and robust method to compute both these thermal resistances. However, it has a fairly intricate mathematical algorithm and is thus not trivial to implement. Consequently, there is considerable interest in developing explicit multipole formulas. So far zeroth-order and first-order multipole formulas have been derived for cases where the two legs of the borehole are placed symmetrically in a borehole. This paper presents new explicit second-order multipole formulas, which provide significant accuracy improvements over the previous formulas.